Recent arguments about Syria have provoked memories of the evidence in the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ used to help support action against Iraq.  Professor Rob Briner, Vice-Chair of the international Centre for Evidence-Based Management, describes how we can do better...

  How is social media data accessed and what are the challenges in using it to understand our world?  John Davies of Nesta’s Policy and Research team discusses some of the issues and considers how this...

  In the grant making world we promote the generation of huge amounts of information. It manifests in a multitude of ways, piles of monitoring papers, lengthy pdfs of analysis, carefully crafted responses to outcome statements,...

  Through the below parody,  Ray Pawson, Professor of Social Research Methodology at Leeds University, explores the reality of the complexity of the science of evaluation, focusing on RCTs and their growing reputation as the ‘gold...

  In this blog, the Alliance’s Jonathan Breckon discusses how an ‘evidence-informed’ approach can bridge the gap between research and practice. How do we decide what works? Teachers, police officers, social workers, healthcare professionals and many...

  In this guest blog, Simon Burall, Director of Involve, explores the need for the What Works centres to strike a balance between generating more hard evidence which is better communicated to frontline practitioners, and for...

  In this guest blog, Derrick Johnstone, author of the Alliance’s latest report, Squaring the Circle, develops the evidence discussion from the need for more robust standards of evidence and evaluation to explore the need to...

  Research synthesis will be at the heart of the Government’s new What Works centres, however conducting systematic research reviews is often a lengthy and time consuming process and consequently, difficult to juggle with policy development....